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5 posts from July 2010

Tuesday, 27 July 2010

When you open your section view editor, do you section views look like this?

At first glance you may think that this is controlled by the Edit/View Options or maybe the command settings. However this is simply controlled by the current layer. If your current layer has something like a DASHED linetype, then this is what you will get when launching the Section Editor. Simply change your current layer to something with a CONTINUOUS linetype and the Section Editor will display as expected.

Tuesday, 13 July 2010

It may just be my perspective, but I seem to come across more and more users inquiring about this custom functionality lately. Although this is customization above and beyond what we deal with here in Product Support, I thought some users would like a more in depth overview than what is found in the HELP file: Assigning Optional Properties to a Part Size

Friday, 09 July 2010

We had some reports that customers who wanted to see their surface in Realistic view were always seeing these triangle lines and that they were always gray no matter what color is set in the style. The keyword here is STYLE. These settings are part of the visual Style settings and not objects style. To access these settings please see the steps below.

Tuesday, 06 July 2010

Sometimes in your day to day use of Civil 3D you accept the defaults when it comes to labeling. Working in support I always do, so when I get challenged with creating a style that mimics something like an AutoCAD dimension, I classify this as a fun task.

Being that AutoCAD Aligned Dimensions were not dynamic with Civil 3D objects, the challenge was to create a label that would appear the same, but update with changes made to the Civil Object. In this case it was referring to alignments, but could easily apply to other Civil Objects as well.

First things first we have to create the “dimension lines” that you are more accustomed to seeing on architectural plans. These can be added from the LAYOUT tab in the Label Style Composer dialog, by adding a LINE component. Then it is just a matter of setting the length, rotation, and offset to mimic the “side” and “top” lines that make up the classic dimension look. You will need to set a total of 4 lines to achieve this, with each anchoring to either the start or end of the feature (in this case being the alignment).

Next you will add a text component witch will pull the distances to the precision you desire, ensuring you offset the text from the feature to place it right in the middle of you lines. Now comes the tricky part, the objects that you are labeling are not all the same length, so you will need to prepare for this. One way around this is to have your “top” lines longer than they need to be, even have them overlap a bit. This may cause the text to have a strikethrough look, but this can easily be overcome with the Background Mask set to TRUE for the Distance text component.

Now you have your dimension label style all ready to go, so give it a trial run. Keep in mind that this cannot cover all instances and may take some trial and error to get the way you want it. So the moral of this story is that label styles are quite robust, so if you have something in mind give it a shot, you might be surprised with what you can come up with. Bet you can’t tell which is which without grip editing that alignment :)